


The Last True Immortal

by Jack_of_All_Blades



Category: Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Female Viral (Gurren Lagann), Gen, Genderbent Viral and Yoko, Immortality, Post-Canon, just because i can, my attempt at nostalgia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:20:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26257045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jack_of_All_Blades/pseuds/Jack_of_All_Blades
Summary: Time has no hold on them, they who’d conquered the stars.
Relationships: Simon & Viral (Gurren Lagann), Yoko Littner/Viral
Comments: 3
Kudos: 14





	The Last True Immortal

He’s buried on the island he loved so much, pine trees and a lighthouse and the however many great-grandkids of the children he’d taught and raised with the same love he would have bestowed on his own had he had any. But his memory is lost to their descendants, his vibrancy faded in black-and-white photographs.

And even _her_ memory is fading.

The true curse of immortality isn’t watching all your loved ones die. It’s losing them over and over again, every day, when little pieces of them fade away and you don’t remember you forgot. They die a silent death every time you forget.

_I can’t give you what you want._

Her last words to him, before she’d turned and walked away, dedicated the rest of her very long life to Dai-Gurren.

She’d wanted the same thing as him. Damn, she still does. But there are wounds that time . . . doesn’t heal, no, but perhaps fades to a dull ache. And she’d seen no future for them.

They still haunt her, that vague idea of home, small children with red hair. And when she reaches out, her massive clawed hands attempting the gentlest of embraces, they fade, with laughter like stars in their eyes. _His_ eyes.

On the rare times she leaves the stars and steps foot on the planet that had spun her into being, she wanders. A pilgrim on a lonely trek, she visits a forgotten grave on an island. Stands in silence as she gathers the faded, tattered memories of red hair and gold eyes. She's forgetting what he even looked like.

She stands over two small hills that had once held a sword and a ring. There’s a memorial there, a shrine. They have passed into godhood now, revered as visions of hope. Bright and untarnished by time.

She travels to a bright, golden city thriving and _humming_ with life. She sees the relics of long years past, battered armor entombed as lost history. Knows what it felt like to pilot those old machines, the ability lost with the generations. As far as she knows, she’s the last who retains any such knowledge of the old things.

In all her years, she had needed someone to know how it felt, what it was like, living through the insanity, the sheer _vibrancy_ of that time, of a war that torn apart the world and formed it anew—but everyone is long dead now, leaving her alone.

She’s gathered the stories, and they’re now told across the world, the people she had fought alongside now revered as heroes, gods. More mythical figures than the hairless monkeys who stank of sweat and engine grease, spurred on by nothing but heroic bullshit.

She travels from place to place, remembers those she has lost and gives them their due.

But she always ends her journey in the wasteland of the beginning. The end.

And it is there that she finally meets the last of her companions.

They stand facing each other, much like the first time they had met. But he is no longer a little pup, or anything at all like she remembers. And her memory is long.

She stops before him, slitted eyes roaming over him as if she expects him to fade away, too.

But he stands there, solid and unmoving like the ground beneath their boots. He looks older, weathered. But he is still alive, when he should be dead for centuries. How their positions have reversed. She, once the hunted outlaw, now a leader forging a way into the stars. And here is Simon, once a god among galaxies, reduced to a dusty wanderer.

“I thought I was alone.”

The words slip out, the rasp of her voice strangely subdued in this land at the end. Dust swirls at their feet, threatening to draw them away, to blow them on to different adventures. But she finds no more desire for wandering. The drive is gone.

Too bad it hadn’t faded when she still had a chance of happiness.

“You’re never alone, Viral.” He watches her shrewdly, with the knowledge of centuries lurking in his eyes, the corners of his mouth. “Legends never truly die. They’re still with us.”

_Us_.

He remembers, as well. Knows the vibrancy of life, of the strength of a will bent on piercing the heavens, if only for a brief shining moment. She doesn’t know what to make of this. She’s spent so long alone that she’s learned to not care. She’s cursed Lordgenome so many times for giving her such a poisoned gift.

“And what does that make us?” she barks out a laugh. But the pain is little more than a dull ache now.

Simon shrugs, the butt of his drill-spear tapping into the dirt at his feet. “Me? I’m a nobody. I drift with the wind. You? The brightest star the universe has ever seen.” His eyes, one twisted with Spiral energy, crinkle at the corners. “I have to say, congratulations. On the promotion.”

She makes a sound like exasperated cat, but her eyes rest almost fondly on that worn visage. There is still a glimmer of youth in his gaze, it lingers in his crooked smile. The pup is still there, after all. “You would have known a while back if you’d bothered to stick around,” she rasps.

He leans on his drill staff, mouth creasing into a grin. “I hear things now and again.”

She’s forgotten how the earth speaks to him. Simon the Digger. Born deep below the ground, lost to a daughter of the skies, and returned once more to the earth that had borne him.

He understands the pain of being left behind.

But he also understands the pain of healing.

A smile bares razor teeth, but there is no malice. She has not felt the crushing sense of loss or misdirection that she had fought for a long time. And when she returns to the stars, to Dai-Gurren as it is now, she knows this may change but it will pass her by. Both of them. Time has no hold on them, they who’d conquered the stars.

But there they stand, in the place where it all began, the beginning of the end.

.

**Author's Note:**

> This was a work of love, something that's been languishing on my computer for over 5 years. FYI this is a post-timeskip/female Viral, so she is a bit different from canon!Viral. Hope you enjoyed!


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